Vacasa - Guest Chat

My Role: Product Manager leading the product team (4 engineers, 1 designer) for post-booking applications, in this case the Trip Manager web application.

Background: Vacation rentals are a high-touch, customer service heavy industry, where fast and effective communication is critical. Guests may need immediate support for everything from check-in problems, to issues inside the home, to questions about their upcoming stay. Previously, the only way to contact Vacasa had been through our call center, and the business struggled to staff and scale the team in order to keep up with demand and handle customer problems in a timely manner.

Adding live chat as a new customer service communication channel in the Trip Manager could provide a number of advantages over call. First, since the user is already logged into the application, CX agents will already know who they are, the details of their stay, and the rental unit information, allowing them to provide quick and effective service without having to go through a verification process. Second, the asynchronous, text-based nature of chat allows agents to maintain multiple conversations simultaneously, which isn’t possible over the phone.

Objectives: By implementing a live chat feature in the Trip Manager, we could reduce the average handle time per customer contact, thus making the CX team more efficient and scalable, while providing a better experience for our guests.

Project:

Connecting to Twilio Flex WebChat

The CX team was already using Twilio Flex as a communications platform, and it offered an NPM package that would allow us to send chats through from the web. We worked with the product team managing this to configure and install chat on the web.

Building the Chat Interface

Working with our UX Designer, we implemented a customized chat widget following Vacasa’s brand and font guidelines. The widget lives in the lower right corner of the screen, and expands with a welcome message when clicked.

Widget fixed to lower right hand of browser screen

Testing & Rollout

We opted to pilot chat with a small set of users in order to measure results and ensure that the customer service team was trained and ready to handle the new communication channel. As more agents were trained, a greater percentage of users saw chat available in their Trip Manager. We utilized an Optimizely feature flag in order to control the traffic allocation for the roll out.

Results: Customer service chat interactions took a full minute less than phone calls, saving the CX team hours every week.